Watch Before Viewing Machete

November 17, 2010

Revenge is a dish best served cold as Movies.ie takes a look at what movies to view before Machete hits cinemas!

Kill Bill

When you decide to take out a professional hitwoman, you better make darn sure you finish off the job because if not she’ll be pretty mad when she comes round. So it is with The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Tarantino’s take on the martial arts revenge film. After being left for dead in a massacre on her wedding day, The Bride sets out to get revenge on her previous colleagues – all of whom are deadly in their own ways but none of whom are quite as angry as The Bride!

Straw Dogs

Hugely controversial on its release in 1971, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs took the rape-revenge genre (which until then was really something that was consigned to low budget exploitation films like I Spit On Your Grave and Ms. 45) to the mainstream causing widespread uproar. Dustin Hoffman stars as mild mannered David Sumner who enacts violent revenge against the men who raped his wife. Not surprisingly it fell victim of censorship laws and was banned on VHS until recently!

Oldboy

Oldboy is the second and best part of Park Cahn-Wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, which began with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and ends with Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Oldboy tells the story of a man called Oh Dae-Su (played by Choi Min-sik) who has been imprisoned in a hotel room for fifteen years without knowing who it is that is keeping him captive or why. When he is abruptly released, Dae-Su sets out to solve the mystery and to take his revenge for his time in captivity.

Death Wish

Hurray for Charles Bronson; the moustachioed face of vigilante justice! In Death Wish, Bronson stars as Paul Benjamin, a peaceful man who is profoundly changed when his wife and daughter both die after a brutal home invasion. Benjamin is the man with nothing left to lose and begins a campaign to fight back against the criminal element of society; deliberately setting up situations that will entrap lawbreakers and enacting his own brand of gun-based justice on them.